Bound for Glory

Over the past decade, as select photographs by modernists and postmodernists alike were earning million-dollar prices at auction—witness the records for prints by Edward Steichen and Richard Prince—a less celebrated movement was transforming the market for photographic literature. Dealers and collectors, aided by the publication of several recent histories, are recognizing what the late MoMA curator John Szarkowski observed 20 years ago: Certain photographers are best appreciated in—and do their best work for—books rather than gallery shows.

Serious collectors, as well as speculators, are snapping up prized editions from the past and present as never before. They are rushing to acquire canonical photographic books for many of the same reasons that connoisseurs began buying photographs 30 years ago: the realization that even multiples are in limited supply, and some are more precious than others.

The photograph and photo-book markets have grown up together. The first auction for either category in the U.S., the 1952 Marshall sale of Americana, held at Swann Auction Galleries, in New York, included many lots of both. Made up of items from the estate of the Rhode Island chemical engineer and businessman Albert E. Marshall, it attracted spirited bidding, although the prices seem laughable today: A copy of William Henry Fox Talbot’s A Pencil of Nature, 1844–46, among the first and greatest photographic books ever published, sold for $200.

Swann has devoted a separate catalogue to photographic literature since 1981 and has enjoyed steady success. In October of last year, the house sold a partial set of Edward S. Curtis’s epic ethnographic study, The North American Indian (16 complete portfolios with photogravure prints and 16 illustrated text volumes) for more than $1 million. A copy of the first U.S. edition of the Zurich-born Robert Frank’s melancholic view of his adopted country, The Americans, from 1959, went for $13,800 in May 2006. In that same sale, a signed copy of Edward Ruscha’s Twenty six Gasoline Stations, one of his Minimalist documentary masterworks, sold for a record $20,700.

“It’s a robust market,” says Daile Kaplan, who directs Swann’s photographs department. “But when you consider its youthful nature, photo books in general are still undervalued. It’s the artists who, in a sense, make the market. A number of photographers who began working in the ’60s and ’70s saw the book as an appropriate venue.” Its flexibility and the potential for creating structured narratives as the pages turn were hard to ignore.

The wide appeal for collectors is evident as well. “The book is a perfect format to look at photographs,” says Sven Becker, a Christie’s specialist based in London. “The images, the layout, the materials, the bindings—all these elements come together to create a specific experience. Unlike a work of literature that you may read once or twice, you can keep photo books on your shelf, take them down and remind yourself what you like about them. The response is immediate.”

Becker is putting his opinion on the line this month with the April 10 sale of Rare Photographic Literature at Christie’s New York, which he organized. “This is the first time photographic books of such uniformly high quality have been offered for sale,” he says. The estimates support his appraisal: The total sale is expected to bring $1.5 million to $2.2 million, and individual items could fetch upwards of $90,000.

The collection, put together over 10 years for an anonymous American connoisseur, comprises two hundred 20th-century books—from Alvin Langdon Coburn’s 1909 London (est. $10–15,000) to Richard Prince’s 1995 Adult Comedy Action Drama (est. $20–30,000)—that are not only in prime condition but are all inscribed by the artists. A New York edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, from 1952, for instance, carries an estimate of $20,000 to $30,000 because of its handwritten message to Edward Weston: “à Édouard avec l’amitié de Hank.” Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit, 1933, his second book and a sensual celebration of Paris in all its dark and dirty glory, is represented in the sale by a copy signed to his friend the Hungarian photographer André Kertész (est. $30–50,000).